2011 SQL Server Magazine Editors' Best and Community Choice Awards

SQL Server Magazine editors and readers recognize standout products in eight categories, making it easy for you to find the right tool.

By providing two distinct perspectives on the market, theannual SQL Server Magazine Editors' Best and Community Choice award programs offer a unique way to recognize the hottest products among the past year's offerings. Our Editors' Best program highlights products that SQL Server Magazine editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition, whereas our Community Choice program lets our readers decide which products are the best.

For the Community Choice program, we didn't just present a predefined list of products and services that limited your selection. Instead, we let you nominate your favorites, built the voting survey from there, and let everyone participate in the final voting phase. For our Editors' Best program, we also reached out to readers to find out how the Gold winners help you do your jobs. We spoke to real users about real experiences, and we hope these testimonials benefit you in your environment.

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By providing two distinct perspectives on the market, theannual SQL Server Magazine Editors' Best and Community Choice award programs offer a unique way to recognize the hottest products among the past year's offerings. Our Editors' Best program highlights products that SQL Server Magazine editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition, whereas our Community Choice program lets our readers decide which products are the best.

For the Community Choice program, we didn't just present a predefined list of products and services that limited your selection. Instead, we let you nominate your favorites, built the voting survey from there, and let everyone participate in the final voting phase. For our Editors' Best program, we also reached out to readers to find out how the Gold winners help you do your jobs. We spoke to real users about real experiences, and we hope these testimonials benefit you in your environment. In these pages, you'll find our Gold, Silver, and Bronze Editors' Best winners directly adjacent to the Community Choice winners in each category. Sometimes our editors and readers agreed on favorite products and services in a given category, but more often they didn't. Choosing favorites from such a competitive field can be a challenge, but this year's winners show an uncommon breadth of functionality and originality.

Do you agree with our editors' choices? Or do our readers' picks carry more weight? Let us know! Regardless of whether the winners were chosen by editors or readers, you can be sure that all these products are worth serious consideration if you're in the market for a new tool.

Best Backup and Recovery Software Product

Why It Won: Red Gate Software's SQL Backup Pro stands out in the SQL Server backup market thanks in part to two features: The product provides network resilience, which allows your backups to pick up seamlessly from where they left off in the event of a network outage, and a fourth compression level, which lets you achieve higher backup compression rates.

"We had a situation where backups were taking far too long to complete and where network latency was causing backup failures. While we are in the middle of an infrastructure overhaul, we needed to address the existing situation quickly and reliably," says SQL Backup Pro customer Kiara Rodemaker, the manager of IT Accounting Services at Czarnowski. According to Rodemaker, her team chose SQL Backup Pro over other SQL Server backup tools because "SQL Backup Pro combines ease of use with great value for the price. It installs easily and ultimately just works well." Rodemaker says that SQL Backup Pro provides "reliable backups that compress well, don't fail, and can be automatically moved across the network."

Daren W. Wagner, Design & Solution Architecture, Application Engineering at Ernst & Young, explains that his company was looking for a solution that would improve the productivity of its SSIS developer, while also standardizing the operational support of SSIS packages. The company chose BI xPress because it allows for real-time monitoring of the SSIS packages running on the server, and the package builder feature lets the company reuse components and accelerate script development. According to Wagner, the greatest benefit of the product is the "auditing and monitoring framework, which helps to track down performance issues and defects in SSIS packages."

Why It Won: Productivity is vital for every database developer, and Red Gate Software's SQL Developer Bundle is a collection of 10 essential SQL Server development tools that are both powerful and easy to use.

"Red Gate's SQL Developer Bundle includes SQL Prompt, which provides IntelliSense-like help for writing T-SQL scripts," says Michael Otey, technical director for SQL Server Magazine. "It also provides SQL Source Control, which facilitates team development, as well as SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare, which let you compare and synchronize databases. In addition, the SQL Search tool enables you to quickly find database objects. The tools in the SQL Developer Bundle are integrated with SQL Server Management Studio, making them easy to assess and use."

"Managing a production database involves a diverse set of tasks, all of which are important and cover a wide range of activities," says Michael Otey, technical director for SQL Server Magazine. "Idera's SQL toolbox helps the DBA perform the most important of these management tasks. SQL toolbox includes the SQL admin toolset for system-monitoring diagnostics and troubleshooting. It also includes a number of other important utilities. The SQL comparison toolset compares data and schema, SQL safe lite provides compressed backups, and the SQL virtual database enables quick database recovery. One feature that sets Idera's SQL toolbox apart from other database management tools is its SQL doctor feature, which provides an easy-to-use wizard that helps non-DBAs diagnose and remediate SQL Server performance and tuning problems."

"This product's performance dashboard provides you with the overall health of the server instance from a single pane of glass," says Michael Otey, technical director for SQL Server Magazine, "and it also allows you to switch between real-time and historical performance analysis. Query Plan Analysis lets you quickly find high-cost query plans by color-coding the different query tasks. One feature that really sets Performance Advisor apart from other performance-monitoring solutions is it graphical disk-space display, which shows database utilization by disk."

Best Security/Auditing/Compliance Tool

Why It Won: Providing proof that a company is meeting its regulatory-compliance requirements is a major pain point for DBAs. But auditing doesn't need to be difficult, if you have the right tools. Idera's SQL compliance manager continues to rate best-in-class by providing low-impact, real-time auditing of all user activity as well as data and object changes. The product offers filters so that you're collecting only the data that is needed to fulfill auditing requirements, lets you create alerts for more than 200 SQL Server event types, and provides reports that enable you to easily demonstrate that regulatory requirements are being satisfied.

"Due to our requirement to be PCI-DSS compliant as we deal with credit card payments for various customers, we required a tool that would easily enable us to audit activities within our databases," says Kevin Chant, a SQL Server database administrator at HTEC. "We noticed that [SQL compliance manager] was used by other PCI-DSS compliant vendors in the industry, and after testing it we realized that this product was our best option due to its pricing strategy and simplicity." Kevin goes on to say he has found several benefits to using SQL compliance manager. The product is simple to install and configure. In addition, the GUI provides an array of options that lets his team audit and filter a vast range of database activities. Finally, Idera offers levels of support "from account management to customer support," says Chant.

Best Storage Hardware Product

Why It Won: At a turning point in the trajectory of the storage industry, XIO Storage-with its awesome Hyper ISE-is pioneering a unique path that focuses on performance rather than capacity.

"Microsoft Partner Solutions Center (MPSC) hardware-testing projects are designed to put maximum stress on systems so that customers can have the utmost confidence in deploying them in support of business-critical functions," says David Hayes, director of the MPSC. "In such a demanding context, XIO Hyper ISE performed beyond our wildest expectations with the [hard disk drive/solid-state drive] solution that we tested. Where most storage systems have underperformed before, we felt like we hardly put a dent in the Hyper ISE performance potential. We estimate it would take an increase of workload by a factor of 10 to push the Hyper ISE we tested to its actual performance threshold. We're looking forward to deploying it in the MPSC environment."

"You can use SQL Sentry's Plan Explorer to get faster performance and tuning information from SQL Server query plans," says SQL Server Magazine author Kevin Kline in his Tool Time article "Plan Explorer." In "Plan Explorer," Kline explains that this free tool's readability and usability features are efficient and easy to use, and they make analyzing SQL Server execution plans a snap.

"Hands down, one of the best tools out there! If you’re responsible for a database, you should be using Ola's scripts. It’s very comprehensive, is efficient with resources, has numerous options, and is a brilliant piece of SQL coding!"

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